Week 9 Rankings & Game Flowbotics

I don’t know about you, dear readers, but I am opposed to trade vetoes in fantasy sports. I’m not talking about cases of collusion. If you can somehow prove that two owners are in cahoots, sure, drop the veto gavel. Any legitimate deal should go through, so long as both owners believe the trade helps them. I don’t care if an owner’s belief in a trade is incorrect or otherwise misguided. They should be allowed to make mistakes. Mistakes help us learn. And because we can’t predict the future with full certainty, any trade can play out contrary to our expectations.

With all of that said, I still find myself getting mad online at certain deals I see go through. In one of my more casual one-quarterback leagues this week, an owner dealt away Antonio Brown and Matthew Stafford for Tom Brady. I stayed on the high road with my frustration bottled up for a while, but the trade review period in this league is excruciatingly long. Seeing the deal’s notification at the top of my team page every day eventually broke me, and this message board post happened (the managers’ names are omitted for the sake of anonymity):

You guys realize QBs have no value, right?

Look at the top teams in the standings. [First place] is using Matt Ryan and Eli Manning, both of whom have been legit terrible. [Second place] has Alex Smith, who has been great, but was undrafted. Including this upcoming Week 8 matchup, [third place] has started five different QBs over the past six weeks, including Brian Hoyer, DeShone Kizer, and Case Keenum. [Fourth place] just switched from Carson Palmer to Josh McCown, two guys who have been under center since the first administration of George W. Bush.

This is all to say that the trade of Matthew Stafford plus Antonio Brown for Tom Brady is basically just Brown (only one of the best wide receivers ever) for nothing. Nice work, [eighth place].

Holy anecdotal evidence, Batman! This league is a great case for the viability of late-round quarterback drafting, as well as streaming the position in-season. On the 2QB Experience podcast, I often talk about the large middle class of quarterbacks, but I was still pretty surprised that none of the good teams in this league featured a high-end passer.

To put the morass of quarterback mediocrity into context, I decided to dive into the numbers. Across the entire league, signal-callers have scored an average of 14.27 points per game. Yes, that number includes part-time performances due to in-game injuries, but all quarterbacks are at risk of those situations in any given week, and I wanted to account for that. Anyway, to put the overall average of 14.27 points per game in perspective, Matt Ryan, a disappointment by any account, averages 14.25 points per game this season. Twenty other quarterbacks have been better than average, and 19 of those players have played at least 6 games, so don’t try to blame small sample sizes.

However you slice it, it’s easy to find quarterback production in one-quarterback leagues. Owners in 2QB and Superflex leagues don’t have it quite as easy. If your two-quarterback squad is trying to scrape by with mediocre or bad passers, properly playing matchups takes on a lot of importance. For Week 9, as always, we have the Game Flowbotics spreadsheet to help us dissect those matchups:

No space between this week, folks. I got caught up watching the World Series, so we’re going straight into the Week 9 Rankings. For a deeper dive into the stats, come back to TwoQBs on Friday and check out my Game Flowbotics A-to-Z article.

Week 9 Rankings

Greg Smith is an engineer, co-founder of TwoQBs.com, and enthusiast for the strategy and design of variance-based games. When he started playing fantasy football in 2001, his home league's small number of teams necessitated starting two quarterbacks. That necessity has since grown into obsession, making Greg one of the preeminent champions of 2QB and Superflex formats.